Wednesday, April 26, 2017

New Zealand spied on Japan to help the United States at an international whaling meeting in 2007, according to a classified National Security Agency document.

The Intercept website published the paper, received from US whistleblower Edward Snowden, as part of an article on Japan's secretive relationship with the National Security Agency.

The document, marked top secret, outlined a mission where GCSB spies collected information on Japan and passed it on to the NSA ahead of a key vote.

[...]

New Zealand spies were collecting "insightful" intelligence that "laid out the lobbying efforts of the Japanese and the response of countries whose votes were so coveted", the document said.

Japan probably wasn't the only target - GCSB's area of operations includes the South American and Pacific island states whose votes Japan was hoping to buy - most of whom are our friends. And while New Zealanders disapprove of whaling and want to support the IWC moratorium, I think many of us would also be deeply uncomfortable with the idea that we would spy on people and tap their phones to do that. Its invasive, underhanded, two-faced - the exact opposite of the values we want our foreign policy to express.

And that's the core problem: spies are corrosive of our values. Its one thing to spy in wartime, out of military necessity. Its quite another to do it in peace, on your friends, for self-advantage. If an actual person did that sort of thing, most people wouldn't want to know them. And now that we're known to do it as a country, many of our friends won't want to know us either.